Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, confirmed that the platform lowers the video quality of Stories and Reels, which do not attract significant viewership. He disclosed this during an ask-me-anything session on Instagram Stories, explaining that this measure prioritizes videos with higher traffic for better encoding resources.
According to Mosseri, this policy affects all video formats on Instagram, including Stories, Reels, and longer videos. The rationale behind this decision is to allocate computational resources more efficiently, ensuring that videos receiving considerable attention are streamed in higher quality.
Mosseri elaborated that Instagram’s algorithms automatically reduce the quality of older Stories and Reels that fail to garner substantial views. This is intended to free up resources for content that continues to draw large audiences. Typically, the quality reduction occurs after the initial popularity of a video wanes, which could be a few days to a few weeks.
This approach has raised questions among users, particularly regarding the transparency of such policies. Concerns about how this might impact smaller creators were also voiced, prompting Mosseri to clarify in a Threads post that the focus is on content quality rather than video quality. He assured that the degradation in video quality is minor and generally does not affect user engagement.
